There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (7 page)

“It’s all right,” he said, nodding as he followed Maye into her office and she picked up the aloe vera ointment. “All I had to say was ‘hot flash’ and everyone understood, plus I reminded them that Sylvia Plath once threw all of her clothes off the roof of the Barbizon Hotel. People are starting to talk to me at work again, sort of, and eventually, they’ll be able to look me in the eye. I think you’ve become the department’s Zelda Fitzgerald. Zany, unpredictable, so ‘Faculty Significant Others Gone Wild!’ Let’s count our blessings that I’m not in the film studies department because then the whole thing would be on tape and for sale in the bookstore for $19.99. Really, I just want you to concentrate on having a good time at the tea. And if anyone there tells you they hate what you’re wearing, come home, change, and then go back and whip them with your oxford. Remember our new motto.”

“I know.” Maye sighed. “‘Naked belongs at home.’”

“Say it again,” he coaxed. “Just so I can be sure. My mother always warned me this would happen if I married you, but she said you’d be drunk first and sailors would be involved.”

“I won’t get naked at our neighbor’s tea party, Charlie, I swear,” Maye promised, dabbing the soothing salve along the line that looked like someone had tried to lasso her like a calf. “What do you think, should I march in like Little Edie Beale with a sweater pinned around my head and holding a baton, go for a simple headband, or proudly wear my scar and use it as an icebreaker?”

“Unless you want to answer repeatedly that no, you are not the French lady who gobbled a fistful of Valium, fell down, had a dog eat her lips off, and then got a face transplant,” Charlie exhaled, “I’d wear the headband and leave the baton at home. We don’t have enough money for you to be considered eccentric, only enough to be considered a belt that hasn’t gone through all of the loops.”

Maye tied the silk scarf around her head, put some lipstick on, and fussed with the bronze-beaded collar of the pink sweater. She was actually beginning to like the sweater, the way the beads sparkled, and the intricacy of the beading, and felt the need to exorcize the spicy vulgar act that had been associated with it. Besides, you can’t throw an expensive sweater away after one wear, she thought, even if it did peel the skin right off your forehead like a cranial circumcision.

Rowena could go to hell, Maye thought as she opened the front door and stepped outside to cross the street; it’s afternoon.

The first thing that Maye noticed when she entered Cynthia’s living room was that enormous pieces of plywood were placed erratically all over the floor. The second thing she noticed was that she was the youngest person there.

By about half a century.

In fact, she was one of only a few who didn’t bring her own chair, as the room was so crowded with motorized medical equipment that it looked like a Rascal Rodeo, thus the sheets of plywood that were improvising as ramps. There wasn’t one model or brand of mobility scooter that wasn’t represented, all lined up on the far side of the room: the Zoom 300, the Avenger Series, the Buzzaround, the Legend XL, the Go Go Ultra, the Sonic, one after the other, so that the tea party looked like a Sturgis rally, although one plagued by osteoporosis. Maye resisted the urge to compress her spine and hunch over just to stop feeling guilty about her ability to stand upright without the aid of a torture rack.

Suddenly, the reason for the absence of noisy children on the street became clear. Most of the women in attendance were only there due to the marvels of modern medicine and oxygen tanks, since all of them had most likely felt the tremors of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. And not the one that knocked down the freeway.

Maye sat on a couch between an elderly woman named Agnes, who had skin so thin that it looked like it came off a roll of Saran Wrap, and another lady, who had already fallen asleep.

“That letter carrier of ours is such a dear,” one of the ladies in the scooter lineup said, to which Maye scoffed in her head but wisely remained silent. “He told me that a vicious dog just moved into the neighborhood and that if I was going to use the Renegade to go to the store, I needed to use my high speed. He said that dog knocked him over backward and almost ripped his throat out! And the owner just stood there! And they live on this street!”

Every single lady in the room except for Maye and her slumbering neighbor gasped in naked fear.

“How fast does the Renegade go?” a woman with cropped gray hair asked her. “Is it as fast as the Celebrity?”

“The Renegade had speeds up to
six miles an hour
,” the first lady boasted.

“Oh, that’s fast,” another lady said, shaking her head. “That’s a little excessive, if you ask me. Where am I going that I need that kind of speed? Space?”

“Not if a crazy hellhound is chasing you!” a lady in a chair leaned over and cried, shaking her crooked, buckled finger.

“Hmmm,” the ladies agreed, nodding.

“Where’s Alma?” Agnes, the Saran Wrap lady, asked gently as she looked around. “Is Alma here? I haven’t seen her in weeks!”

Every member of the scooter gang smiled at her inquiry, but no one said a word.

“That portrait of Cynthia is still so stunning, isn’t it?” said one of the women who could still stand, pointing to a black-and-white photograph that hung over the mantel. “I remember that day like it was yesterday. Actually, I remember that day better than I remember yesterday!”

Laughter, sounding like a gaggle of clucking ducks, filled the room.

Maye’s gaze followed the finger of the woman to the mantel, and took in the photograph of a very young, coiffed, and elegant Cynthia kneeling, her head bowed forward slightly as an older man with a thick white mustache placed a crown upon her head. To Maye, it looked like a scene from a play.

“Do you remember Cynthia’s dress?” the silver-haired matron said dreamily. “The layers of tulle, tier after tier on the strapless bodice. She looked just like Grace Kelly. It was lovely.”

“Oh, Maude, I do remember that dress!” Cynthia said as she swept into the living room holding a large tray filled with tiny sandwiches. “I no longer have that dress, but look at all the friends I still have!”

As Maye darted her eyes back and forth between Cynthia and the old photograph, she noted that her neighbor hadn’t changed much in all of those years. She was still tall and thin, and clearly stood out in the room as the only one who had drunk the necessary amount of milk during her calcium-needy years. Her complexion hadn’t grayed and her skin hadn’t dropped like a feed sack; it stayed high and firm on her cheekbones. Age hadn’t attacked Cynthia the way it had fought with the other ladies in the room; for a woman who was terrified of a dirty dog-food can, she must have had some pretty quick footing, Maye noted, and ducked each time the sandbag of time came hurtling at her, unlike most of her guests, who had not only gotten socked but stayed down for the count until the geriatric bell rang.

“You know, Elsie, we didn’t see you at the last Silver Songbird meeting,” Cynthia mentioned, nodding at the woman on the Renegade. “We missed you, but I’m sure we can find a place for you somewhere in the cast. Almost all of the men’s roles need filling. My husband can’t play every single male role, he’s getting a big head! It’s hard enough to find a man alive, but to get them to sing—”

“Was Alma there?” Agnes asked. “Has anyone seen Alma?”

“I was getting my colostomy bag replaced,” Elsie replied. “It leaked all over my good Sunday dress at the prayer circle! I’m so sorry I missed the auditions. Oh, our last show was so much fun!”

Ah, drama people, Maye thought with a sigh. Being bitten by the drama bug is every bit as dangerous as a nibble from a malaria-ridden mosquito; one person contracts it every thirty seconds, there’s always an abundance of excessive gasping and everyone around that person hopes they don’t catch it.

“‘Three little maids from school are we,’” sang Maude, in a high, wavery voice, her puckered hands cupped together under her chin. “‘Pert as a school-girl well can be!’”

“‘Filled to the brim with girlish glee,’” Elsie screeched, almost as if on cue.

“‘Three little maids from school!’” the remainder of the women warbled, in a broad variety of pitches.

“‘Everything is a source of fun,’” Cynthia crooned alone as she made her way to the front of the room in a short-stepped sort of shuffle.

“‘Nobody’s safe, for we care for none!’” Elsie sang, only overshadowed by the hum of her Renegade battery pack kicking into action as she parallel parked in the spot next to Cynthia.

“‘Life is a joke that’s just begun!’” Maude chirped, finding her way to the front of the room in little hops until she stopped next to her fellow cast members.

“‘Three little maids from school!’” all three sang in the best unison they could manage, smiling demurely behind their fan hands, now fully in their roles as Yum-Yum, Peep-Bo, and Pitti-Sing.

Now, if Maye had proven just to be minutely more talented in the area of recreational sports as a prepubescent lass, she would have been completely astounded and perhaps a bit alarmed by the instant production that was suddenly being staged in Cynthia’s living room, complete with drama faces. But Maye, at the age of twelve, had run a grueling and life-altering fifteen-minute mile in a PE class as her inner ice-white thighs were christened with flagellant red welts, thus beginning her initiation into the plague of Chub Rub. As a result she swore that if sports had this sort of consequence, she would be abstaining from such activity, due to either uterine cramping, common cafeteria corn-dog-induced nausea, a Bubble Yum–blocked esophagus, suspicion of catching an asthma bug from an unhygienic girl in third-period U.S. history, an occasion of sudden and unexpected partial blindness from looking at the sun for far too long, or the most predominant, a headache resulting from drinking an overly hot can of soda. And that is precisely how Maye joined the drama club and came to the acquaintance of Mrs. Gelding, drama instructor, who spoke in a falsetto, rolled her
r
’s, had a belly big enough to house a fifty-pound tumor that truly pushed the miracle stretch of her polyester slacks, and wore her hair in a tight little gray perm reminiscent of a young Roman boy. She was the director, choreographer, costume designer, hairstylist, makeup person, singing coach, and prop master for any and all theatrical productions at the bastion for the arts that was Maye’s suburban middle school. Mrs. Gelding, well into her sixties and unwilling to consider any production that she didn’t define as among “the classics,” ran the Drama Department on a shoestring budget, but given that her entire repertoire consisted of two alternating productions—
H.M.S. Pinafore
in the fall and
The Pirates of Penzance
in the spring—it was a rather easy swing. “The only difference between a sailor and a Keystone Kop,” she was fond of saying, “is the hat and a vice or two.” It was an easy sell, particularly since neither the students nor their parents ever truly understood the plays and thought they actually were the same production, year after year, as does a good percentage of suburban humanity, being that no one else really cares.

Maye’s mother had insisted that all of her children participate in at least one after-school activity for “socialization purposes” and, as Maye suspected, to extend her coffee-drinking-and-talking-on-the-phone-to-her-friends time for an extra hour. So instead of joining the basketball, softball, track, or any other kind of team that required sweating in private places, Maye signed up for drama. She was a sailor in the fall, a cop in the spring, and found out that the difference in the roles really was only a hat. She never had a line in either musical and blended in with all of the other eleven-and twelve-year-old girls who played sailors and cops and pirates with little tiny boobs when all each of them really wanted to do was wear a big frilly hoop skirt and sing a solo.

It was never to be.

Then, in the fall of her eighth-grade year, the drama club met to see which girl would be a pirate and which girl would be a cop, and an odd thing happened. The Drama Department received a windfall when the school budget was increased after the school won a lawsuit against the corn-dog distributor who had poisoned several seventh graders and the vice principal with rancid preformed and battered meat sticks. As Mrs. Gelding fought back tears of elation, she announced that instead of buying the sailors white costumes and the cops blackjacks, the money would be used to build a new set, since
Pinafore
and
Penzance
used the same one.

The drama club would embark on
The Mikado
, another musical by Gilbert and Sullivan, based in Japan but really a satire on the “notions and culture of Victorian England,” as Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia, will tell you. In other words, another production that seventh and eighth graders and their parents didn’t find entertaining, humorous, or in the least bit interesting and dreaded both performing and watching.

“Why can’t we do
Grease
?” asked a blond, petite girl with clear skin and a Pepsodent smile, an obvious first-draft pick for the role of Sandy. “Greenway Middle School got to do
Grease
! We want to do
Grease
!”

Mrs. Gelding’s tight little-boy perm visibly smoked with fury. “We will not do
Grrrrrrease
!” she said definitively and between clenched teeth. “I will not have that porrrrrnography on
my stage
. The lyrrrrrics to those ballads arrrrre filthy! We will do
The Mikado
. It’s a classic!”

And then Mrs. Gelding scanned the crop that lay before her and picked out the lassies with the darkest hair, because although she had a budget for a new set, there was no money for wigs and it was doubtful that any of the truly pretty girls would dye their flowing honey-blond hair Japanese black. “You,” she trilled, pointing to Maureen Zemora, a bespeckled chubby girl, the one Maye claimed to have caught asthma from. “Come, come. Up here. And you.” Mrs. Gelding pointed to Dawn Lee, who was taller than most boys in the school and had shoulders broader than the principal’s. “Come, come. And…and…and…you!” She pointed to Maye’s floppy, curly mass of dark brown hair that, in eighth grade, resembled the hind end of a labradoodle. “Come, come.”